Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic

by Scott Gottlieb

The shortcomings with the way the CDC would collect its data, and then use these samples to try to render a national estimate through modeling, showed itself in other settings, including how the agency reported data on seasonal flu, where the CDC also uses models to try to make estimates of the annual number of hospitalizations. This is why, when the CDC reports flu data each year, its estimates have such a wide range, why they have a big “confidence interval.” For example, in the 2018–19 flu season, the CDC estimated that there were 97,967 people between the ages of fifty and sixty-four who were hospitalized for flu.18 That number sounds fairly precise, right down to the last sixty-seven people. However, it turns out that the confidence interval for that data, the range of potential estimates, was actually between 69,808 and 167,123 hospitalizations. So that means it might have been 70,000 patients. Or 100,000. Or 150,000. Or perhaps 143,294.